Washington State Cougars lead nation … in arrests

The numbers are in and America’s most-arrested college football program is none other than Pullman’s Washington State Cougars.

Former San Jose Mercury News reporter Mike Rosenberg did the number-crunching and found that there were 918 reported arrests (and criminal citations) of Division I college football players over the last five years. That’s good for an average of about one every other day.

Then, just to be thorough, Rosenberg compiled a top 25 list of which schools had the most players arrested in that same time frame.

Rosenberg found that WSU was, in fact, No. 1, pulling away from some stiff competition to the tune of 31 arrests in that five-year sample. The University of Florida made a run at the top spot but came up well short with 24 arrests, while Georgia (22), Texas A&M (22) and Oklahoma (21) rounded out the top five.

To be fair, these numbers don’t reflect the severity of the crimes, meaning that at least some of those arrests could have been for fairly innocuous offenses.

Even so, WSU has just 18 wins in those five years, meaning the Cougs are one of the few teams to have more players arrested than games won. Their 18-31 win-to-arrest-ratio is also easily the most lopsided of any of the qualifying schools.

Three college football teams have more player arrests than wins in the last 5 years, and several others are close: pic.twitter.com/ciYlZI867M